By Steve Holland, Jarrett Renshaw
MORRISTOWN, New Jersey (Reuters) -President Donald Trump urged Russia on Sunday to stop its attacks in Ukraine while his top diplomat said the United States might walk away from peace efforts if it does not see progress.
Speaking to reporters in New Jersey, Trump said he was disappointed that Russia has continued to attack Ukraine, and said his one-on-one meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the Vatican on Saturday had gone well.
“I see him as calmer. I think he understands the picture, and I think he wants to make a deal,” Trump said of Zelenskiy.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, said the Trump administration might abandon its attempts to broker a deal if Russia and Ukraine do not make headway.
“It needs to happen soon,” Rubio told the NBC program “Meet the Press.'” “We cannot continue to dedicate time and resources to this effort if it’s not going to come to fruition.”
Trump and Zelenskiy, in Rome for the funeral of Pope Francis, met in a Vatican basilica on Saturday to try to revive faltering efforts to end the war in Ukraine. The meeting was the first between the two leaders since an angry encounter in the White House Oval Office in February and comes at a critical time in negotiations aimed at bringing an end to the conflict.
Trump rebuked Russian President Vladimir Putin after that meeting, saying on social media that there is “no reason” for Russia to shoot missiles into civilian areas.
In a pre-taped interview that aired on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia would continue to target sites used by Ukraine’s military. When asked about a Russian strike on Kyiv last week that killed civilians, Lavrov said that “the target attacked was not something absolutely civilian” and that Russia targets only “sites which are used by the military.”
Zelenskiy wrote on the messaging app Telegram that his top military commander reported that Russia had already conducted nearly 70 attacks on Sunday.
“The situation at the front and the real activity of the Russian army prove that there is currently insufficient pressure on Russia from the world to end this war,” Zelenskiy said.
DIFFERING PROPOSALS
Ukrainian and European officials pushed back last week against some U.S. proposals on how to end the war, making counterproposals on issues from territory to sanctions.
American proposals called for U.S. recognition of Russia’s control over Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Moscow seized and annexed in 2014, as well as de facto recognition of Russia’s hold on other parts of Ukraine.
In contrast, the European and Ukrainian proposal defers detailed discussion about territory until after a ceasefire is concluded.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Sunday that Ukraine should not agree to the American proposal, saying it went too far in ceding swathes of territory in return for a ceasefire.
Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, said the U.S. president has “expressed his frustration” at both Putin and Zelenskiy but remains determined to help negotiate an agreement. Waltz also said the United States and Ukraine would eventually reach an agreement over rare earth minerals.
Chuck Schumer, the top U.S. Senate Democrat, said on Sunday that he is concerned Trump will “cave in to Putin.”
“To just abandon Ukraine, after all the sacrifice that they made, after so much loss of life, and with the rallying of the whole West against Putin, it would just be a moral tragedy,” Schumer said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
(Reporting by Steve Holland, Jarrett Renshaw, Kanishka Singh, David Morgan and Doina Chiacu; Writing by Andy Sullivan and Ted Hesson; Editing by Don Durfee, Deepa Babington and Will Dunham)
